Technology

‘Leap Second’ and Violent Storms: How the Internet Died Twice This Past Weekend

Several Websites Disrupted by Storms and the Leap Second Over the Weekend

Screenshot of the time clock the night the leap second was added. (Image: Wikimedia)

You might or might not have noticed but the Internet died this weekend — twice for some websites. Adding one tiny second — a leap second — to the international timekeepers’ clock caused a bit of a blip on many websites. It took several down for nearly an hour, which can be an eternity in the digital world.

As Wired puts it, some sites were just not “able to cope” with the additional second:

Many computing systems use what’s called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to keep themselves in sync with the world’s atomic clocks, and when an extra second is added, some just don’t know how to handle it.

The “leap second bug” hit just as the web was recovering from a major outage to Amazon Web Services, an online operation that runs as much as one percent of the internet. Some operations, including Google, saw the leap second coming and prepared for it, but others weren’t so diligent.

Sites that were notably affected included Mozilla, Reddit and Gawker.

The second was tacked onto the clock at midnight universal time Saturday, June 30, going into July 1. That’s 8 p.m. EDT Saturday. Universal time will be 11:59:59 and then the unusual reading of 11:59:60 before it hits midnight.

A combination of factors, including Earth slowing down a bit from the tidal pull of the moon, and an atomic clock that’s a hair too fast, means that periodically timekeepers have to synchronize the official atomic clocks, said Daniel Gambis, head of the Earth Orientation Service in Paris that coordinates leap seconds.

The time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis – the definition of a day – is now about two milliseconds longer than it was 100 years ago, said Geoff Chester, spokesman at the U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the official U.S. atomic clocks. That’s each day, so it adds up to nearly three-quarters of a second a year.

Timekeepers add that leap second every now and then to keep the sun at its highest at noon, at least during standard time. This is the first leap second since January 2009 and the 25th overall. Gambis said the next one probably won’t be needed until 2015 or 2016.

Although it wasn’t necessarily expected that there would be a noticeable change on computers, it is clear some sites had technical issues. Gizmodo has more on how the crash was handled by some sites:

The end result was pretty ugly. Sites were down for hours, as administrators worked to clean up the havoc wreaked by one little stray second. Gizmodo crashed around 8:00pm EDT, was down for roughly 45 minutes before regaining functionality. But not everyone was affected.

Earlier this year, official timekeepers from across the world discussed whether to eliminate the practice of adding leap seconds. They decided they needed more time to think about the issue and will next debate the issue in 2015.

Google was one of the sites, Wired pointed out, that was prepared for the addition of leap seconds. In a blog post last year, the company explained that it had developed a method to handle these changes:

The solution to this challenge drove a lot of thinking to develop better ways to implement locking and consistency, and synchronizing units of work between servers across the world. It also meant we thought more about the precision of our time systems, which have a knock-on effect on our ability to minimize resource wastage and run greener data centers by reducing the amount of time we must spend waiting for responses and rarely doing excess work.

By anticipating potential problems and developing solutions like these, the Site Reliability Engineering group informs and inspires the development of new technology for distributed systems—the systems that you use every day in Google’s products.

In addition to the leap second, several sites also experienced weather-related outages. Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest’s servers went down due to severe storms in the Washington, D.C., area late Friday night with functionality not being restored until well into Saturday.

(Related: Violent storms leave millions without power during massive heat wave)

Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram are customers of Amazon Inc.’s web services division. The unit provides web services and data storage facilities that are commonly used for “cloud computing.”

So, if you were wondering what was up with the Internet this weekend, there you have it.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Featured image for this post via Shutterstock. 

Comments (16)

  • chips1
    Posted on July 3, 2012 at 9:36pm

    It started in the Garden of Eden. We ate the forbidden fruit because we wanted to be god. It banished us and still we think we can control everything including the weather. The United States was as close as we will be allowed to go. Get ready to be banished, again!!! The serpent is in the White House.

    Report Post »  
    • Bahamonde
      Posted on July 6, 2012 at 12:41pm

      I’m pretty sure what you introduced into the forum is called a non sequitur as you turned an article that is about time adjustment and modern computing into an argument about Barack Obama?

      Report Post » Bahamonde  
  • chips1
    Posted on July 3, 2012 at 9:22pm

    Try and buy a hamburger for $1,00 plus 7% sales tax and the electricity goes out. Your going to die of starvation. Government schools will kill us all.

    Report Post »  
  • VoteBushIn12
    Posted on July 3, 2012 at 9:49am

    “…the Internet died this weekend”

    Clearly the Blaze does not understand what “the internet” is or how it works.

    Report Post » VoteBushIn12  
    • TheePolitinator
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 10:00am

      The thing is I talked to an AT&T engineer a couple of weeks ago, they are in the process of implementing a standardized internet protocol, a dns all providers must use. with this in place they will begin restricting access to sites that contain political or opinionated speech from US citizens, mark my words this is in play.

      Report Post » TheePolitinator  
    • DimmuBorgir
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 10:29am

      There already is a standardized internet protocol.

      it’s TCP/IP

      Report Post » DimmuBorgir  
    • codefool
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 3:06pm

      To the person who said AT&T is working on a new internet protocol… That’s complete crap. AT&T is pretty irrelevant when it comes to the work of internetworking and to just say you can come up with a completely new protocol and expect everyone to use it in pretty quickly is just bunk and shows that your said source knows nothing about the internet and underlying technologies.

      IPV6 has been around for years and it still hasn’t been adopted yet despite a big push and available IPV4 address exhausted and yet someone magical new protocol developed by someone as irrelevant as AT&T is going to be deployed overnight?

      There‘s a huge existing infrastructure existing in companies all over the world that can’t just magically be upgraded willynilly to support imaginary protocols.

      I call BS on this.

      Report Post »  
    • angelofmercy
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 3:11pm

      I would have to agree with you. Those that were not effected by the storm/s could have checked the pulse of the internet@ http://internetpulse.net/ I have no doubt that in some places it was “Critical” , but died? lol Maybe “their internet died” but not THE INTERNET.

      Report Post »  
  • dennisS
    Posted on July 3, 2012 at 8:35am

    The reason the earth is slowing down is because of all those wind generators. They need to reverse the rotation of the blades and it will speed the earth back up! Once again the greenies have screwed things up!

    Report Post »  
    • kickagrandma
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 8:44am

      LOL… made me smile this a.m. Thank you!

      Have driven through fields of these. My impression then as now is, “Something evil this way comes.”
      They are terrifying not only to me but to all birds and animals that used to fly and live there.

      Report Post »  
    • grudgywoof
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 8:46am

      Very Good! LOL

      Report Post » grudgywoof  
    • Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 9:04am

      NEWS FLASH:

      “DC Alert: Miracle Worker Obama raised his hands and slowed the earth by nearly a second; he declared it ‘leap second’ for his great work. President finally proven terminally insane for his effort; God be praised for that revelation…”

      Report Post » Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}  
    • independentvoteril
      Posted on July 3, 2012 at 12:12pm

      for kickagrandma… ever wonder when driving through them what would happen if ONE of them caught fires..fell over OR lost one of their blades.??? I wasn’t happy on vacation driving through a forest of them..

      Report Post » independentvoteril  
  • grudgywoof
    Posted on July 3, 2012 at 8:31am

    There are so many vulnerabilities in the web and we rely on it for everything. We are leaving ourselves open for a major catastrophe because all the eggs are in one basket.

    Report Post » grudgywoof  

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